After discovering that my music staple, Pandora, is cutting me off at 40 hours allotted time per month (see bulletin here), I’ve been on the search for a comparable replacement. The call went out on Facebook and people did not disappoint. Here are the two main services I tried:
Last.fm and Grooveshark.

Here is what I was looking for that Pandora so generously offered (except the listening time restriction):

1) The ability to create a play list of various artists based on the similarities between a decided artist (i.e. listening to the Duke Spirit radio on Pandora gave me an endless supply of similar artists like the Raveonettes, Heartless Bastards, The Dead Weather etc.).
2) The loving ability to show my distaste in unworthy songs or artists that would play on the given station (the ever-so-popular “thumbs down” on Pandora).
3) A very easy interface with which to locate various artists and/or songs.

And the winner is…..Last.fm!

It meets all the requirements for a suitable Pandora replacement, plus it has so much additional information like the ability to see similar artists without even necessarily listening to the station. There are also pictures of the artists! It’s like going back to reading kids books all over again. I may be persuaded to make a permanent switch, however I have noticed that the artist selection per station varies between Last.fm and Pandora. Not good or bad, just different. Something to keep in mind. Their algorithms may vary in how songs are picked for each station.

Grooveshark is not completely to be discounted though for me. It is a great resource to easily listen to unending songs from a single artist. I ended up listening to the Shins nonstop last night. It seems time consuming to create a station with automatically chosen artists based on similarity, but perhaps I’m missing something. You can inform me if that’s the case. Now back to listening to St. Vincent on Last.fm.

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